


i wanna visit the future and dance in a field of light!

by feralphoenix



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: F/M, Politics, Pre-Canon, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-31
Updated: 2018-01-31
Packaged: 2019-03-11 19:45:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13531254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feralphoenix/pseuds/feralphoenix
Summary: Toriel, young noblewoman and knight aspirant of the kingdom of monsters, returns from an unsuccessful errand to find the prince having a good sulk.





	i wanna visit the future and dance in a field of light!

**Author's Note:**

  * For [light_rises](https://archiveofourown.org/users/light_rises/gifts).



> _(Will we ever more kiss on the boardwalk’s fading rail?_ – and one said, ah, behold how we have [aged](http://antigonick.tumblr.com/post/170280993566/and-one-said-ah-behold-how-we-have-aged))
> 
> the relationship dynamic and characterization here comes Largely in part from my observing that pregame asgore has a very similar character arc to phosphophyllite. as a remedy to that very sadstuck revelation please imagine teenage asgore looking at his own reflection and proclaiming himself to be both kawaii and ririshii

Immediately upon opening the door and looking inside, you are greeted by the sight of Asgore Dreemurr, Prince of the Monsters, lying on his back on the floor and gazing absentmindedly at the ceiling, with his waist propped against the side of his bed and his hindquarters sticking up into the air, feet dangling lazily. The pink-gold-white silk brocade of his tunic is crumpled unflatteringly around the rolls of his belly, his scarlet hose are uneven, and even the mane and beard he’s doing his best to grow and usually keeps impeccably groomed are just a gold-threaded white mop on the floor.

Irritation stabs up through you immediate and shameful, and you consider for just a moment telling him that he looks like a fool and to stop acting like a pathetic whelp, but instead you just take a deep breath and close the door behind you.

“Toriel,” he says, eyes flicking to you and staying there for a good few minutes before he goes back to ceiling-gazing.

You sit next to his head, folding your long squire’s robes neatly and primly around your haunches in the vague hope that it might impart some sense of proper princely grandeur to him. This fails to meet its mark, but it is a result you expected, so you let go of frustration when you breathe out.

“How did things go?” Asgore asks, still not making any visible attempt to shake off his overall posture of sulk.

“Not well.” You think again of their dark fingers curling around the pole of the weapon it shocked you a little that they had brought, their mouth cramped in a frown, their brown-black eyes meeting yours and then avoiding them, hiding behind their hair. “I offered them a place here, but… I believe I may have come on too strong. I do not think that they will be back.”

Asgore squeezes his eyes shut and peels his lips back from his teeth, groaning at the ceiling. “Even though they will only be miserable in that village! In a place where no one will truly let them alone, or accept them for who they are…”

“They were not happy about it,” you tell him, “but they still chose to stay with the humans. Maybe they feel as though it would be betraying their kind, or they fear retribution, or they do not want to risk sparking further conflict. They never exactly told me their reasoning.”

Asgore grunts, deflating even further. He looks like a pancake collapsing under the weight of too much strawberry cream. “I wish my parents hadn’t forbidden me from going. My presence would, I admit, have probably been useless but I would at least have gotten to try.”

You look him over: The tailored clothes, the pink pads of his feet, still soft. “You are in a mood.”

“We got new refugees from the north while you were out trying to convince our friend,” Asgore informs you. “According to my mother, the humans came for them in the night and killed about a third of them before they reached our borders. She is not even allowing me to go visit the survivors, and do what I can to help them.”

The situation is getting more and more grim, then; no wonder none of your friends have been willing to push it by so obviously siding with you. But that is not the part that is frustrating Asgore, you think. “You will have your time,” you tell him as gently as you can.

“I won’t. My parents insist on wrapping me in wool wherever I go. I am not even sure whether it is that they believe me to be too young and too delicate, or that they think I am too young and _stupid_ and liable to cause some sort of diplomatic disaster because I am too friendly to humans.” He turns towards you, as though conspiratorial. “Or both. Perhaps that is the most likely.”

“You _are_ in a mood.”

“What am I supposed to _do?”_ he says, raising both hands as if beseeching the heavens rather than you. “I know that outside the castle doors there is real suffering and there are real problems, and I know that practically speaking there is nothing that I can do. If there is some way to change the status quo I cannot find it.”

You take his hand and hold it tight. A little shiver runs through his body before he tightens his fingers around yours, and it makes something thump in your chest.

“You sent me,” you tell him.

“Toriel, you have so much more to do in life than to be my errand runner. I don’t like having to use you to get anything done, especially when the scope of your potential is so much greater than mine.”

“It is not greater,” you say. “Only different.”

He sighs again. “There is more that you can do _in this situation._ It amounts to the same thing.”

Asgore would be handsome if he just stopped being so self-pitying and sat up instead of lying in idiotic poses. But the idiotic pose is still expressive: He’s such a restless mess of the desire to do something, anything, to help, squished flat by everyone around him telling him that he is useless and still just a child. His ears are flopped inside out on the floor and as you watch he scrunches up the top of his muzzle just a little and blinks.

Frustration is something you understand, too. Once when you were a child you and a mingled group of other young monsters and humans climbed to the top of a local hill and watched a storm bearing down across the plains, an oppressive weight of cloud crawling towards you, pouring sheets of water and shedding thin streamers of lightning, and seeming horribly to grow. That is what this inexorable war puts you in mind of: Get out of its way, or find somewhere high and dry to hide until it passes.

“Keep talking to your parents,” you say, holding his hand tighter still. “Keep doing what you can, and so will I. I will be a knight soon, and I will be able to move more freely then. You will get more duties, too, and as the people see that you are not a child anymore they will be more willing to listen to you. It is nothing to make yourself into a sad pillow over.”

Asgore laughs, just once. “Tori, we cannot even save our own friends.”

“But we cannot live without hope,” you tell him. “And if we try to live without compassion, we are even less than monsters.”

The human that you suppose you can no longer call your friend was with you that day, atop the hill. They reached out and held your hand then, tiny brown fingers with their pink nails stretched wide to fit between your own. Their palm was clammy with some emotion you could never guess at then, and still cannot know now. Asgore had stood on your other side, and you reached out then to hold his hand in yours, just as you’re holding it now. You’d stood in a line, in awe at the fearsomeness of nature, and when all of you went home to the villages you all got scolded by the adults just the same.

“You’re very strict,” Asgore remarks, bringing you back to the present day.

“I just do not think that we can afford to let go when this is all we have,” you say.

He releases your hand and struggles to right himself, straightening out his clothes and combing his claws through his fur.

“Maybe you are right,” he says, resigned. “My parents are worried about those strange pale human settlers from overseas and their warlike ways, too. Things are already tense enough as it is. They will _have_ to give me at least something to do, even if it is small and inconsequential.”

“Doing what we are able is a good step,” you say, nodding, and then you reach out to take his hand once more. “And I will be with you all the way, if you need some common sense or a second opinion. I promise.”

“I would never know what to do without you,” Asgore says. “I am well aware that you have more common sense in a single claw than I have in my whole body. Golly.”

You elbow him gently, and he elbows you back, and so on and so forth until you’re both giggling like children.

It is awful to be caught like this at an age where you have so much awareness of how precarious the situation truly is but little idea of what you can do to change it. You wish very often that you could either return to childhood and to knowing and caring naught, or skip forward to being an adult and therefore being afforded some degree of control.

 

 

(Ten years in the future—when war has broken out, when Asgore’s parents are dead at the hands of the humans and you and he sit uneasy upon the thrones that have not yet grown cold, when the last survivors of monsterkind cower at your backs, the weight of all their lives bearing down upon your shoulders and his—you will learn to rue that wish.)


End file.
